


rumination (the history of ruin)

by morningsound15



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: (and also hopefully cathartic), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Death, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Suicidal Thoughts, This is really sad, You've been warned, but yeah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 19:41:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13910820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morningsound15/pseuds/morningsound15
Summary: On the anniversary of Lexa’s death, Clarke wakes up in the woods, alone.OR:The story of Clarke and her grief.





	rumination (the history of ruin)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [figure eight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6179167) by [clarkegrff (fayevsessays)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fayevsessays/pseuds/clarkegrff). 



> This is a sad one. Mostly just a 12,000-word angst-filled stream of consciousness, really. So be warned.
> 
> I’m tagging this with some pairings so no one goes into this with the wrong idea, but I want to be clear that this is **not** a story about relationships; it’s a story about grief and loss and longing. But it does deal with Clarke in certain romantic and/or sexual situations, so I thought I would make sure you were all notified.
> 
> This was partially inspired by the incredible [ figure eight ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6179167) by clarkegrff (fayevsessays).

____________________

On the anniversary of Lexa’s death, Clarke wakes up in the woods, alone.

It’s become a tradition for her, of sorts. A morbid one, and one that’s brand new, but a tradition nonetheless. Every year on the week of the anniversary, Clarke packs a small bag of provisions and a few clothes and her gun and a knife (Lexa’s knife, the knife she slipped quietly into Clarke’s hand — _I hope you never need it,_ she said — before Clarke left her alone in her bedroom, the last time she had been anything close to happy) and she leaves. She walks out of Arkadia in the dead of night and she makes her way into the heart of the forest. She makes a small fire, she hunts, she sleeps, she thinks. She counts the days. She waits. She feels.

The first time she disappears, the first time she takes her lonely sojourn into the woods, she slips out without telling anyone that she is leaving at all. She doesn’t leave a note, doesn’t tell anyone where she’s going (she couldn’t tell them where she’s going even if she had wanted to — after all, she hadn’t even planned on leaving).

By the time she finally returns to camp the whole place is in an uproar, the entire compound abuzz with nervous and anxious energy. There’s a murmuring she can hear all the way from the tree line, like an anxious hive of bees who have misplaced their queen.

Clarke understands the unsettled air. _Skaikru’s_ situation with the surrounding _Trikru_ has been improving, to be sure. Tensions have been easing, slightly, in the long months that have passed between those early days of skirmishes, hostility, and war. But the situation isn’t perfect. It’s nothing close to perfect. And Clarke disappearing in the middle of the night hadn’t made things any better. (She gets a flash of _Finn, a gun, a village, 18 dead_ before she shakes it away.)

She walks back into Arkadia, dirty and covered with grime, her hair a tangled mess of dead leaves and broken twigs, and before she can even blink her mother has her arms wrapped around her shoulders, and she’s squeezing her tightly. “Where the hell have you been?” Abby asks her, her voice tight and her eyes wild, scanning up and down Clarke’s body for any sign of damage.

Clarke is tired. Bone-weary and more than a little hungry after a full week outside, on her own, in the forest. But even with the toll on her body, she finds she has rather enjoyed the time away. It had been nice to have some time to herself. A reminder of an easier time, when all she had to do was sit around and wait for her own death, up there amongst the stars. A reminder of her months spent in isolation, living undercover, hiding her face and her hair while she maintained a stringent separation from her own people. A reminder of a worse time, when she’d had the deaths of hundreds of people on her hands.

(She still has the deaths of those hundreds of people on her conscience, but it’s a different sort of pain, now. She no longer sees images of the bodies from Mount Weather whenever she closes her eyes. Now, there’s only really one death that matters. Only one that keeps her up at night.)

“Clarke?” Her mother shakes her, and Clarke realizes she never answered her. “Are you listening to me? What happened to you? Where have you _been_?”

Clarke shrugs, unwilling or perhaps unable to explain herself properly. She thinks there’s very little chance her mother would understand her, even if she did try. So she simply says, “I had to leave, for a while,” and hopes to leave it at that.

“Without _telling_ anyone?” Abby’s angry, but beneath the anger there’s real fear. Clarke can sense the fear; can almost smell the way it’s rolling off of her mother in waves. She can’t really blame her for her anger, but she resents the fear with every ounce of her being. “Do you have _any_ idea… two more days and Bellamy was ready to storm the surrounding villages looking for you.”

Clarke’s eyes flash. “You need to stop letting him have guns,” she says with something like bitterness in her voice. “It’s not safe.”

Her mother ignores her. “You can’t just disappear like that without telling anyone where you’re going! It isn’t—” Clarke ducks underneath her arms and disappears inside the Ark without glancing back. She ignores the way her mother calls out to her, the way she yells.

She doesn’t need to hear all this. Not again.

(Raven will explain to her, later. Raven will pull Abby aside in the Med Bay and explain the significance of her daughter’s disappearance, will tie the event to a specific date, one year prior. Abby will sit heavily down onto an empty chair and bury her head in her hands.)

Later that night, when Clarke wraps herself around blankets that smell like nothing, she will close her eyes and cry and cry and cry until she finally cries herself to sleep.

She cries that night, but it’s the last time she cries for a good long while.

____________________

The second year after Lexa dies, Clarke wakes up in the woods, alone.

It’s the same as the year before but also different. Maybe. It’s hard to tell.

Nothing is remarkably different. Nothing is better. Nothing is worse. It’s… the same but not.

Last year she trudged into the woods, so deep into the forest under canopies so thick she couldn’t see the sky, couldn’t tell whether it was day or night. The air damp and dark and cold. The woods so impenetrable she thought for a minute she would never be able to find her way back out.

(She hoped she would never find her way back out.)

This year, she camps by a river, and bathes naked in the water under the light of the early morning sun. It’s painfully cold, the kind of cold that immediately shocks her system, that feels like a sucker punch to the gut, that leaves her lungs aching and burning as she struggles to draw a breath, but she revels in it. Submerges herself completely, head under clear rapids, hair flowing freely out behind her like seaweed, and holds her breath until it feels like she might pass out. She holds her breath until she can’t anymore, until her lungs are screaming at her, until her chest in burning, until she thinks she may open her mouth underwater and breathe in deeply, inhale the bitterly cold water just for something to do.

She breaks the surface with a gasp of freezing air and feels the ice shoot all the way through her.

When she drags herself out of the riverbed, her feet slipping against the smooth rock of the beach where she made her fire, she’s shivering so violently that her teeth clash painfully together.

She drops down, her back against stones that are warming a little under the heat of the sun rising high in the sky but which haven’t quite yet shaken their chill from the previous night. Her lips turn blue in the air and she stares up at the sky until it’s so bright and blue that her eyes water and burn and she sees spots.

When she finally pulls her clothes back on they smell like flowers and campfire and like the trees and the river. She pulls her clothes on under the shadow of a mountain, cutting a purple figure in the morning mist. She pushes her arms through the sleeves of her jacket before she stops. She looks out at the world stretched before her, close enough to touch. She could walk out into the field on the other side of the river, could walk and walk and walk aimlessly until the familiar stretch of wood behind her disappeared forever. She could slink off into that field and walk until her legs gave out and no one would ever be able to find her.

She would be alone, finally.

She packs up her belongings and heads back to Arkadia two full days early.

She’s already gotten what she needs from the river.

____________________

She loses Niylah, slowly but surely.

It’s not really on purpose. They don’t mean to come together; they don’t plan to fall apart. They just drift. They drift aimlessly. They drift together, they drift away, they drift back together. The thing between them is light; it’s air; it’s intangible; it’s soluble. Even on their best days they’re never really anything more to each other than a warm bed and a comforting companion.

A year or so on from when she loses Lexa, and she loses Niylah, too.

She knows Niylah feels something for her. She knows, because Niylah tells her as much, a few weeks before they end. _I don’t expect anything from you, Clarke,_ she says, her eyes wide and honest, and Clarke believes her.

But expecting and wanting are not the same thing.

Clarke knows that Niylah wants something more from her, but what she wants, Clarke is not able to give. That’s probably why they stop, in the end. It hurts Niylah too much to exist as only a partiality in Clarke’s life. And Clarke can’t manage anything more than a fragment of herself. She’s not physically capable.

Though they have a mutual understanding of what their relationship entails, Clarke knows that it isn’t what Niylah wants. She knows how it hurts her. If Clarke were a better person, she would end things right away, as soon as she figures out that she’s causing more pain than she’s alleviating. But Clarke is not a good person, has never pretended to be, and so she lets their arrangement continue, draws it out out out until finally Niylah is the one to break.

Clarke knows it’s coming. She can feel it. Can see it in the way Niylah looks at her, all soft and pitying and heartbroken. Can hear it in the way Niylah says her name, the last night they’re together. Like they both know this is the end. The way she whispers, _Clarke,_ like she’s begging for something, before Clarke has her hands cupping her cheeks, before Clarke is pulling their bodies tight together.

Niylah touches her quietly, her fingers slow and languid. She slips inside of her, their bodies rocking together like gently roiling waves. When she kisses her, Clarke cries. Just for a moment. She’s not really sure why.

In the morning, Niylah rises from Clarke’s bed and presses a soft kiss to her forehead and says, _May we meet again,_ and Clarke knows that this is it. This is the last time they’ll ever see each other like this. This is the last time they’ll ever share a bed.

Niylah kisses her goodbye and it’s the end. Just like that.

Clarke isn’t hurt by it. She isn’t hurt by anything, anymore. She lost the ability to feel hurt years ago, on the worst day of her life.

(Then again, maybe she can’t be hurt by anything because she hasn’t stopped feeling _hurt_ and _broken_ and _destroyed_ and _agonized_ since—)

Clarke doesn’t lose her completely, of course. Niylah still visits her in Arkadia, every once in a while (for the short amount of time that Clarke continues to live there, that is). They’re something like friends, Clarke thinks. Something like companions. They seem to understand each other.

Niylah understands why Clarke can’t love her.

Clarke understands why Niylah can’t stay.

____________________

Clarke wakes up on the morning of the anniversary and thinks, _Lexa died three years ago._

She looks up at the canopy of leaves over her head and does not cry. She’s not sure she even remembers how.

____________________

She walks into Arkadia 9 days after she left, and the first person she seeks out is Raven. Raven, who has been living and toiling and grieving on her own, too, for as many years as Clarke has known her. Raven, who has become something like her greatest friend. Raven, who spends every moment she’s awake with her fingers working endlessly on some project or other, as a constant distraction. Whose face is set and ashen more often than it’s not, who moves stiffly and gingerly around a leg that agonizes her, with a back that sends spasms up and down her body whenever she twists too harshly. Raven, who has bags under her eyes, who looks like she hasn’t slept a full night in weeks.

She finds Raven in her makeshift workshop. She’s taken to sleeping in there, most nights. She has a room elsewhere in the Ark’s structure, but she prefers to sleep closer to her projects, closer to her machines and her designs. It helps her relax, she says, because she has the freedom to get up and try something new if inspiration strikes her in the middle of the night. It’s relaxing being so near her work, because she keeps strange hours and it’s easier for everyone involved if she just crashes here whenever she feels like it.

That’s what she says, at least.

But Clarke knows that she likes to sleep in here because it means she can work herself to exhaustion, and that’s the only time she’s able to actually sleep. When she’s exhausted. When she passes out because she can’t force her eyes open any longer.

It’s not making her back any better. She keeps a hard cot in the corner of the room, and it’s not making her back any better. It’s not making her limp any less pronounced. It does nothing to help her manage her pain. But none of them have been able to talk her out of it. So.

Clarke finds her in her workshop. She announces her presence with a knock on the doorframe, and Raven looks up from her work smoothly. Like Clarke hasn’t startled her. Like she’s expected.

Clarke watches and notes how Raven’s shoulders drop just a fraction when her gaze finally sets on Clarke’s face. She notes how the lines creasing Raven’s forehead ease, just a touch, when Raven smiles at her.

It’s not a wide smile. It’s not a happy smile. More the marker of relief.

Clarke returns it, feeling a little relieved herself.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Raven says with a nod, and Clarke takes this as an invitation to step further into the room. “I always worry…” She cuts herself off, but Clarke doesn’t need her to speak to know what she was about to say. _I always worry you won’t come back. I always worry this time will be the last time. I always worry what you might do to yourself, out there alone in the night._

Clarke tries to smile. She knows it doesn’t look right, but after all these years she can’t quite remember how to make her lips perform the motion naturally. Every one of her movements is so calculated, now. “Me too,” she says in a moment of casual honesty. It’s too hard, sometimes, to mask every word she speaks. She works so hard on her emotions, on her expressions, on feeling nothing and expressing nothing that sometimes she’s too tired to say nothing, too. She admits that she worries about herself, too, and Raven nods like she understands. Clarke thinks she might.

“Octavia stopped by, while you were gone.”

“Oh.” The word feels strange on her tongue. Wrong. The wrong thing to say. But she doesn’t know what would be right. “That’s nice.”

“She’s worried about you,” Raven says, her head bent over some gadget in her hands. She doesn’t look at Clarke. “Says she hasn’t seen you in almost two months?”

Clarke sits gingerly across from her. “Has it been that long?”

The way Raven’s hands move across her collection of tools is mesmerizing. It’s also almost comically casual, like she’s putting in a real effort to make her movements seem effortless. “You avoiding her?”

“No,” Clarke lies. “We’ve just been missing each other. That’s all.”

Raven glances up at her. “You should try not to shut her out. It only makes her pester you more.”

“I know what she’s going to say. I don’t need to hear it again. Besides, she should know better than to look for me during—” She cuts herself off abruptly, her throat too tight to speak.

“I think she was hoping this year would be different.”

Clarke’s nostrils flare. A surge of anger pushes up through her stomach, and she lets herself enjoy the feeling for just a moment. “She’s a hypocrite,” Clarke says through clenched teeth. “You saw what she did to Pike. By the time she was done with him, they couldn’t even find enough of his body to bury.”

There’s a twitch at the edge of Raven’s eye, like she wants to wince, but she must manage to trample the feeling down because her face remains mostly-impassive. “She just wants you to be…”

“Be what? Better? _Happier_?”

Raven shakes her head. “She just wants you to be _you_ , Clarke.”

Her eyes flash. “This _is_ me. Octavia needs to realize that.” _You all need to realize that_.

Raven reaches out and puts a hand over hers. The pressure is light, and barely-there, but it makes all the anger and hostility leave her immediately. Clarke’s shoulders slump at once and her eyes fall to the table and Raven squeezes her hand once. “She loves you,” Raven murmurs. “And she worries. She just wants to help.”

Clarke shakes her head, her eyes still downturned. “I don’t want her help.”

“I know, Clarke,” Raven says, squeezing her hand once more. “I know.”

____________________

Octavia finds her a week later. Because Octavia _always_ finds her. She’s determined, and an angry sort of person, now, and nothing can ever really keep her away once she’s made up her mind about something.

Avoiding her is pointless. Clarke doesn’t know why she even still pretends like she can.

Octavia stomps into the Ark’s Med Bay one day with paint on her face, her boots muddy from the ride, a little flushed and moving a little stiffly. Her hair is coming loose from its braids, and Clarke knows she must have driven her horse at a punishing pace all morning, to be arriving right now. She must have awoken with the dawn, and ridden all morning with the climbing sun.

Octavia stomps up to her, panting and out of breath, and she glares. “You need to get out of here,” she says, like they’re in the middle of a conversation instead of the beginning of one.

“It’s the middle of the day,” Clarke says, also choosing to forgo a greeting. They haven’t seen each other in two months, but neither acknowledges it. “I’m working.”

Octavia growls. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I’m fine, Octavia.”

“You’re _not_ fine. You’re miserable. You _hate_ it here. You’re killing yourself by trying to stay.” Clarke ignores her, walking past her to begin organizing the first aid kits her mother keeps on a shelf in the back of the room. Octavia huffs. “You don’t _belong_ here, Clarke. You don’t belong in this metal _box_. You don’t belong with _these people_. You need to—”

“I don’t _need_ to do anything,” Clarke spits over her shoulder, pausing just long enough to glare. “You should stop telling me what I need to do.”

Octavia clenches her jaw. “I live in Tondc, now.”

“I know. Raven told me.”

“Right.” A pause. “I’m going back there tomorrow. I can’t stay long. Indra needs me back in training.” Clarke nods, but doesn’t speak. “You should come with me.”

She stiffens, her shoulders pulling up to her ears. She drops the gauze she’s holding onto a nearby cot and turns, slowly. “Octavia…”

But Octavia cuts her off. “I’ve offered,” she says. “I’ve offered to let you come stay with me for _years_. You never do. You just _sit_ here and you hate yourself and you hate everyone around you and you wallow and you cry…” Her jaw clenches again. “You’re _dying_ here, Clarke.”

“I’m still alive.”

“You’re surviving. That’s not living.”

Clarke’s heart clenches in her chest. _You were right, Clarke. Life should be about more than just surviving._

She feels sick.

Octavia takes a step into her space, and it’s only when her hands fall on Clarke’s shoulders that Clarke realizes she’s started swaying where she stands. Octavia slides her hands up to grip Clarke’s face in her palms. “Please, Clarke,” she says, and her voice is softer than Clarke has heard it in years. Maybe softer than she’s _ever_ heard it. “Just… think about it, okay? Promise me you’ll think about it.”

She doesn’t promise. She doesn’t have the breath to do it.

But she does think about it.

____________________

It’s not a decision she makes consciously. It’s one that happens all at once.

She’s sitting in the Med Bay inside the Ark’s structure. It’s a quiet day, with very little for her to do. She can’t see the sun, not from in here (there are no windows this far into the interior), but Clarke knows from her morning walk outside that it’s a gorgeous day, full of bright, clear air and a cloudless sky. Children were playing just outside the gate when she went walking past. Laughing and running and tumbling around in the green grass. Chasing each other, fighting a makeshift battle with wooden sticks, holding hands as they danced in circles, their feet shining bright with dew.

(They have nothing to fear. _Skaikru_ have not been at war in many years. The children are safe, even removed as they are from their parents’ tense watch. They are safe, and have nothing to fear.)

(Clarke watches them with a feeling in her stomach that can only be described as _envy_.)

She has a piece of paper lying out on the table in front of her, and a pencil in her hand. She hasn’t drawn much of anything, not for a few years. The last few times she had made any real effort to draw it had seemed like, no matter how hard she tried, her fingers couldn’t seem to stop shaking as they traced lines across the paper.

(She draws Lexa’s face a dozen times, a hundred, before she throws her pencils into a nearby river.)

(She doesn’t destroy a single one of her drawings but she doesn’t look at them, either. She worries that if she gets rid of them, she may one day realize she’s forgotten what Lexa looked like, and she’ll have no way of reminding herself.)

(She worries that if she ever pulls them out again, she’ll look down and discover that she already has.)

Today is the first time she’s touched a pencil in almost 2 years, and she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.

Today, as she looks off absent-mindedly into the distance, her fingers sketch out an image of sprawling trees, of vast wilderness, of campfires under clear nights, of a million stars stretched out in the dark sky.

That’s how her mother finds her, twenty minutes later. She walks into the Med Bay with a cup of coffee in her hands that she passes off to Clarke easily and with a small smile. She glances down at the page Clarke has been filling with her mindless doodles and asks, “What are you doing?”

And Clarke looks up at her and says, without thinking, “I’m leaving.”

____________________

She rides for Tondc three days later, with a pack of clothes strapped to her horse. She leaves everything else behind, either because she’s decided she doesn’t need it or because she’s decided she can’t bear to have it around.

(The box full of Lexa’s sketches, of course, she keeps with her. Buried in the very bottom of her belongings. Untouched, but there. Always there.)

She has her gun on her hip and her knife on her thigh, and she pushes her horse as fast as she dares.

She slows to a slow trot on the outskirts of Tondc hours later. Lets the scouts see clearly who it is approaching their village.

By the time she gets to the entrance, Octavia is already waiting for her.

Clarke leaps down from her horse and Octavia grips her forearm tightly in greeting. She doesn’t smile, or hug her, or say anything at all. She just leads Clarke back into the heart of the village, past family homes and laughing Grounder children, past warriors training and men tending to fires, past women cooking and young boys doing the wash.

Clarke ignores the way their conversations seem to still as they pass. Ignores the way the faces around them shift, when she’s finally recognized. Ignores the whispers of _Wanheda_ she can hear like a breeze wafting through the trees around them.

She ignores it all, and follows Octavia to her home.

It’s small. There are only three rooms. There’s the main entranceway, which serves as Octavia’s workspace, her weapon storage, and her make-shift kitchen. There’s the room Octavia sleeps in, the smallest room in the house, with one door and no windows — “No way to sneak up on me without me knowing about it,” she says, and Clarke nods like the paranoia makes sense, like the fear of death is something she can relate to.

Then there’s the spare room, the one outfitted with just a simple bed and a few candles. It’s bigger than Clarke’s room on the Ark, and more open. It doesn’t smell like metal, doesn’t smell stale, doesn’t make her head throb. There’s a window that faces east. The sun will rise and the light will spill across the bed, in the morning.

“I built this a few months ago,” Octavia says from the doorway as she watches Clarke deposit her only two belongings onto the bed. “Just in case.”

Clarke looks back at her with something like a smile.

____________________

Clarke studies alternative medicine with the _Trikru_ Healers. She has three years of training with her mother under her belt, three years of acting as a doctor inside the Ark’s mangled shell, three years of learning advanced techniques and performing surgeries and treating bullet wounds and burns and stabbings and torn muscles. Three years of treating _Skaikru_ and _Trikru_ alike with _Skaikru_ medicine.

But even with all of their advanced technology and superior knowledge of disease, _Skaikru_ techniques have their faults, their failings. For one, nobody from the Ark can fix Raven’s leg. Not really.

So when Clarke moves to Tondc, she starts studying with the _Trikru_. She learns about which plants are poisonous and which are safe to eat, which herbs can be ground up and administered to the sick, which combination of natural ingredients and fire make the best solvents, the best fever-reducers, the best pain-killers. She studies meditation with the religious leaders of surrounding villages. She travels to other Clans and learns their customs, their medicines. How the Healers of the Boat People use fish skins to treat burn victims. How those in the Blue Cliff region extract oils from the roots, leaves, and blossoms of native plants for relaxation, treatment of inflammation, anxiety, depression. How the Lake People use water to treat skin blemishes, swelling, pain.

She learns it all.

When Raven moves to Tondc a year and a half after her — her own demons finally too much to stomach staying inside the Ark, too — she moves in with them. They drag in pieces of wood and Octavia coaches them through the construction of another bed that they end up building in the same small, cramped room as Clarke, in the house Octavia calls _theirs_.

And Clarke has been training for four and a half years, and Raven has been in agony for easily that long, so Clarke begins to show her some of the Grounder treatments she’s learned.

Nothing works entirely. Nothing heals her completely. Even the best medical practitioners in the entire universe couldn’t reverse the damage done to Raven’s spine.

But Clarke helps her learn to manage her pain. She helps her learn to breathe more deeply and evenly. To relax, to sleep through the night, to control her movements across the hard and uneven terrain so she can walk easier. She guides her through meditation, through aromatherapy, through herbs and concoctions and salves. She uses hot stones, hot springs, icy water, her own fingers applying consistent pressure to screaming muscles.

It’s not perfect. But it helps.

Raven’s leg never really heals, but she learns to deal with it.

____________________

Three days after the fifth anniversary of Lexa’s death, when Clarke finally walks back into the house she shares with her two friends after yet another week spent disappearing into the woods, Raven stands from her bed across from Clarke’s and stomps towards her, glaring.

Raven kisses her for the first time with her hands angry and persistent and fisting tightly in Clarke’s hair.

Clarke isn’t expecting it, which is partly why she jerks back and away as soon as Raven’s lips brush hers. She was expecting a slap to the face. Not a kiss.

“I don’t…” She says, eyes wide and panicked. She’s only just gotten back from mourning Lexa and she isn’t ready, she can’t do this, she doesn’t _want_ this. This isn’t what she wants or needs she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to feel about this she can’t stomach the thought of something going right she can’t stand the thought of something going wrong.

She can’t lose Raven. Above all, she can’t bear to lose her. “Raven,” she says breathlessly, desperate for her to understand. Things can’t change between them. They can’t. They’re too fragile, too important. She couldn’t bear to lose her, too. “I can’t—”

“Will you just shut up, Princess?” Raven says, shaking her head. Her hands are tight in Clarke’s hair and she looks more angry than anything else, which puts Clarke a little off-balance. “I’m not replacing her; you’re not replacing him. We’re both just…” She shakes her head again. “You can’t keep doing this, okay? So just let me help you? Will you just give me _something_?”

And Clarke nods. She’s forgotten how to speak, how to communicate, how to express herself with words. She forgot a long time ago. But she understands physicality. She understands bodies. She understands how to speak with her tongue and her lips and her fingers. She understands how to bend and how to take, how to give and how to release. She understands how to touch, when words have failed her.

She sinks into Raven’s kiss and it doesn’t ignite a fire within her stomach, it doesn’t make her knees buckle, it doesn’t feel like she’s losing all ability to breathe, like she’s stuck in some fragile moment she runs the risk of shattering. But it doesn’t _hurt_.

Raven’s hands on her skin are warm, and rough. Not rough like _I’ve been handling a sword for ten years_ rough but rough like _I work with fire and metal and explosions and I have more scars on my body than you can ever understand_ rough.

Her mouth is insistent, her kisses needy. Clarke responds with fervor and enthusiasm. Just because she can. Just because she feels like she needs to.

She’s careful of Raven’s leg; mindful of her spine. She lets Raven take the lead, lets Raven press her down into the firm form of the bed she occupies in Octavia’s house (or maybe she should consider it _their_ house, since she’s lived there for going on two years, now), lets Raven’s teeth nip at her neck.

She closes her eyes, and thinks of nothing. She just _feels_.

 

 

When she wakes up the next morning she breathes, and for the first time in a long time she feels something that isn’t _nothing,_ something that isn’t _loss pain anger rage tragedy depression hatred loathing._

She wakes up to Raven’s warm breath on the back of her neck, to Raven’s warm body pressed against her bare back. She rolls over slowly and looks at her. When she’s sleeping, Raven’s face is smooth. When she’s sleeping, she doesn’t look like she’s in pain.

Clarke lets her fingers dance across Raven’s face, her touch light and brushing and barely-there. She watches her sleep for a very long time.

____________________

She learns to love Raven, as best she can. She thinks Raven learns to love her the same way.

They have very little in common. They have always had very little in common. Their biggest connection has always been that, once upon a time, they both loved the same boy. (He was really only just a boy. Strange to think about that, now, when they’re both women fully grown. Finn never lived to be a man.)

They have very little in common. But they’re good together. They are not the same but they’re complementary. They work. They make sense.

They’re good together, Clarke thinks, which is more than she ever used to hope for.

 

 

Sometimes they explode into violent rages, taking out their pain and frustration on the other person. Neither of them ever really learned how to process their emotions properly. Sometimes their fights will get so bad that one of them will stomp out for a week or more, furious and recalcitrant and refusing to budge an inch. But the storm always passes. The guilty party ends up returning when the rage has subsided, when the explosion has faded, or else one of them ends up needing something from the other, or else the nightmares get too persistent to ignore, or Octavia drags them back together and forces them into a separate room to either fight it out or reconcile their differences.

They always work things out. They have no choice, really.

They fight like friends, but they reconcile like lovers.

They’re something in between. Neither one nor the other.

Sometimes they explode into violent rages. Sometimes, they can’t stand to be around each other. Sometimes, Octavia will find herself with a bedmate for days at a time, during the worst of their disagreements. Sometimes, Raven even goes back to Arkadia for a stretch of time, too angry to deal with facing Clarke each morning while her ego is still badly bruised.

Clarke returns to the woods every year like clockwork. And every year like clockwork, Raven refuses to be around when she leaves.

Raven never understood Lexa. She never understood their relationship, nor Clarke’s feelings for her. No matter how long she lives, Clarke knows that she will never be able to see Lexa as anything more than the Commander who ordered the death of the boy she loved.

Raven never understood Lexa, but she understands Clarke. She knows her. She knows her grief. She refuses to take part in it, but she understands it.

When Clarke returns from the woods, Raven is always there waiting for her. And Clarke will sink into her embrace, will let herself be held for a few long moments — as long as they both can stomach, really — and they manage.

They’re good together. They love each other as best they can.

They do the best they can.

____________________

“Bellamy’s interested in you,” Clarke says to Raven one day. There’s no hurt to her voice; no accusation. Her words aren’t jealous or biting. They just are.

Raven doesn’t look up from her workbench. “I know,” she says evenly, her own voice lacking distinct emotion.

Clarke nods as she sinks into the seat opposite. She watches Raven work for a few moments before she asks, “Are you interested in him?”

Raven looks up and her face somewhat resembles a smile. “Why would I need him?” she asks, her eyebrow twitching up in a way that pretends at amusement. “I’ve got you.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Raven hums and nods, turning back to her work. “I know. I just didn’t know how to answer.”

Clarke is quiet for a few long moments. She thinks Raven might be her best friend. It’s hard for her to say, really; they’ve been so much to each other for so long, it’s hard to say if their relationship can really be boiled down to something as insignificant as _‘best friends.’_ “Have you thought about trying something out, with him?” she asks instead.

Raven shakes her head. “It would never work,” she says, which isn’t a _no_. Clarke says as much and Raven sighs. “Bellamy and I…” She shakes her head again. “We aren’t right. He’s not… I’m not what he wants. And he’s not what I need.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

Raven glances up again. “Getting bored of me already, Clarke?”

“I love you. You’re my best friend. I love what we have.” She reaches a hand out and puts it on top of Raven’s, stilling her. “But if you can be happy with him…” Raven’s eyes bore into hers, dark with some expression Clarke can’t read. “You should go for it. If you think he’ll make you happy, you should do something about it.”

She doesn’t need to say any more, nor does Raven need reminding of the things Clarke fails to mention. They aren’t happy, together. Not really. They work for each other; they act as stability and strength, a crutch to lean on, a partnership of mutual benefits. They each provide skills, knowledge, information, strengths that the other lacks. They are companions; someone to fall asleep next to; someone to worry if one of them doesn’t come home at the end of the day. They understand each other more than almost any two people can understand each other.

They love each other, but they aren’t happy. They’re content; they survive; they exist. They find joy and pleasure in each other, at times. Anger and frustration at others. They work together, they make sense, they’re stable, but they aren’t happy. Not the way two people in love should be.

Because they aren’t in love. They love each other as best they can, but they aren’t in love.

“Sometimes it’s easier not to be happy,” Raven says quietly, and Clarke understands her. She’s always understood her.

She feels the same way.

It’s easier to continue on as they have been going. To not risk the balance of their shakily-built existences. To not rock the boat.

Raven has only ever loved one person in her entire life; has only felt complete around one person. She’s afraid of what might happen if she feels that way for someone else again. She’s afraid of what that might mean for Finn’s spirit, for Finn’s memory. She’s afraid that if she finds happiness with someone else, she’ll never be able to forgive herself. That he’ll never be able to forgive her.

(Finn would want what’s best for her. They have to both know that implicitly. But still, Raven is afraid.)

Clarke understands that feeling intimately. It’s why she allowed her relationship with Niylah to fizzle; why she continues her current relationship with Raven.

Her grief, her mourning, her pain… it’s a beast. Sometimes it feels unconquerable. Sometimes it’s so heavy and daunting she doesn’t think she’ll be able to get out of bed in the morning.

But she knows it. It’s familiar to her. She revels in it; in the reminders it provides.

She worries that if she ever stops feeling it, it will mean she has forgotten what it feels like to love and to lose. She worries that if she ever stops feeling her grief, it will mean she has forgotten what it feels like to love Lexa.

She never wants to forget.

 

 

They each choose to cope in different ways. Clarke wallows; Raven ignores.

Raven wraps her body around Clarke’s and they share heat while they sleep. Raven’s breath tickles at the back of Clarke’s neck, her lips brushing soft kisses to the skin there every once in a while, when she wakes up sporadically in the night. Her arm encircles Clarke’s waist tightly and Clarke threads their fingers together and lets herself be held.

They sleep like that most nights, wrapped up in each other like they’ll never truly be pulled apart. And when Clarke wakes up in the morning, her eyes still bleary and her head still groggy with sleep, with her back to Raven’s front she can pretend, for just a moment, that the body pressed against hers is just a little different — a little taller, a little thinner, a little more muscular, with green eyes and lighter hair and a face that exploded in radiance whenever it smiled.

They stay together.

____________________

When Clarke is closer to 30 than she is to 20, she finally returns to Polis.

 _(Do you want me to come with you?_ Raven asks her, fingers pulling loosely through Clarke’s hair.)

(Clarke shakes her head. _No. That’s alright. I think I’d rather be alone.)_

(Raven nods in understanding. She always understands.)

She had thought it would hurt, to see someone else sit on Lexa’s throne, to see someone else occupy Lexa’s space, to see someone else demand the respect that Lexa had wielded effortlessly.

But Lexa has been dead for many years, and when Clarke finally comes face-to-face with Ontari, the woman who succeeded Lexa’s rule, she finds she doesn’t feel very much at all.

Ontari is older than Clarke has ever seen her. The anger she remembers being present on her face, in her body, thrumming through her blood… it’s not there, anymore. With the Ice Queen dead, with her own rule cemented, with the Flame buried under her skin…

To her credit, Ontari has been a competent leader. The fear Titus had held that _Azgeda_ would use their position within the Council (and as head of the Coalition) to mount a tyrannical insurrection over the politics of cooperation have proved unfounded. And Clarke will never know exactly why or how Ontari changed her tune, will never truly understand how such a volatile, murderous woman could somehow become a benevolent and contemplative Commander.

She’ll never know Ontari’s life, nor her motivations. She will never know what made her the way she was, nor what changed her into the woman she is now. Maybe it was Nia’s influence over her that fostered such rage and hostility. Maybe it was her own thirst and desire for power. Maybe it was the culture of _Azgeda_ , or the system of governmental power that made her believe she was destined for greater things. Maybe it was _blood must have blood,_ the cycle of war and vengeance and violence of Grounder society before Lexa brokered peace between the Clans. Maybe it was brainwashing. Maybe it was some combination of all of the above.

Clarke will never truly know what caused the change in Ontari’s behavior, her philosophy, her leadership. But when she comes face-to-face with the other woman she sees something flash in her eyes, something so brief and momentary that if she had blinked she surely would have missed it.

And Clarke thinks that she might understand. It’s only a whisper, a premonition maybe, but… she thinks she might understand.

“Thank you for coming, Clarke.”

“My Commander summoned me. Did I really have a choice?”

Ontari stands with her back to the room. She’s on her balcony, her eyes pointed out over her kingdom, observing it in the light of the setting sun. The orange hue of the sky makes the whole world look like it’s on fire. “You are not a prisoner, here,” she says in Clarke’s direction, though she still does not turn around. “And you… you are not my enemy.” She pauses for a moment. Her shoulders rise and fall, like she’s taking in a deep and silent breath.

Clarke takes a few more steps into the room. Not all the way — she pauses before she reaches the throne, Lexa’s old throne — but she stands with her shoulders square and her expression fixed and determined. “Thank you, _Heda_ ,” she says, and the words don’t tear at her like she thought they would.

Ontari looks at her carefully, like she’s studying her. She steps away from her balcony and back into her own throne room. Clarke, though she feels the urge to shrink back and away, does not move. “Do you know why I asked you to come here?”

Clarke shakes her head. “How could I?”

“Well, you needn’t worry. This is not about your people. This is about you.” Clarke doesn’t tell her that that is, in fact, much worse.

Ontari moves past her, her cape ( _Lexa’s cape_ ) sweeping out behind her on the cold stone ground. She approaches her throne and pauses, her fingers just brushing against the wood of one of the arms, like she doesn’t know whether or not she wants to sink down into it or remain standing.

She chooses to stand. “I’ve heard of the work you have been doing, in _Tondisi_. Your medicine.” Ontari turns to face her, finally. “If the stories that have reached me are true, I must say that I’m impressed.”

“Thank you,” Clarke says again, with a slight incline of her head.

“I was hoping you might consider returning to Polis.” Clarke’s hands clench at her side, an involuntary reaction. “I have been discussing matters with some of my best Healers, and I believe you could be a great teacher to them. You have much to offer in the ways of medicine and healing. There has never before been one with your knowledge of two such different cultures and practices. I think that if you—”

“No,” Clarke says quickly, cutting her off.

Ontari pauses. “No?”

Clarke shakes her head. “ _Moba, Heda_ ,” she says, the _Trigedasleng_ sliding easily off of her tongue after so many years. “I’m sorry but… I can’t.”

If the words anger her, Ontari hides it well. “Very well,” she says, “I respect your choice.” She folds her hands behind her back, and the move is so very _Lexa_ that Clarke’s chest aches, for just a moment. “I am sorry to have brought you all this way for such a short conversation.” Clarke shakes her head like it doesn’t matter, even though it does. Ontari still watches her closely, her eyes holding Clarke’s gaze steady like she thinks this may be the last time they ever see each other. “You may leave whenever you like,” she says as a dismissal, but Clarke does not move right away. “Unless,” Ontari continues, noticing her stillness, “there is something else?”

“Why didn’t you kill me?” Clarke asks, because she’s always wondered. “You had the chance. You’ve had a million chances. I’ve been living only a few days’ ride from here for years, but you never came for me.” Ontari’s mouth is closed, her lips pressed into a tight line. Her shoulders are drawn back, the muscles of her body drawn tight, like she’s working very hard to keep herself still. “I would have thought you would want to claim the power of _Wanheda_ for yourself.” She says her own title like it’s a curse, and the way her face contorts around the word is anything but subtle.

“The other Commanders…” Ontari sakes her head, and corrects. “The will of the Flame is strong. I learned years ago that… fighting it is often worse than heeding it.” She pauses, and her hand unconsciously falls to her sword. Clarke watches the movement with hawk-eyes. (It’s hard, even now, to tackle her innate will to live, that desire to fight for her own survival. Though it might be easier to succumb to the ease of indifference, it’s hard not to feel like flinching when Ontari’s hand wraps around the handle of her weapon.)

Ontari notices the expression on Clarke’s face, notices the way her eyes have tracked the movement of her hand, and immediately lets it fall uselessly to her side. “I won’t hurt you, Clarke,” she says sincerely, her voice quiet. (Too quiet, for this situation. It makes Clarke uncomfortable.) “I made a promise, one that I intend to keep. As long as you live within the boundaries of the Coalition, you will always be safe.”

“I don’t need your protection.”

“You have had my protection for years. You just never knew it.”

Clarke grits her teeth tightly. “I don’t _want_ it.” And she _doesn’t_. She doesn’t want anything to do with this woman, this Coalition, this city. She gave up all claims to it, all claims to mattering, all claims to a position of power when she watched Lexa’s eyes flutter closed for the last time.

She wants no part of this. And Ontari had no right to take that decision away from her.

“I—” Ontari’s eyes flash with something, something hard, something unreadable. But she swallows the words in her throat and clears her expression, returning it to its previous blank mask. “Very well,” she says with a nod. “If that’s what you want.”

Clarke nods, and without another word she turns to leave.

But Ontari’s voice behind her stops her. “I hope that…” Clare pauses with her hand on the door. “I hope that you may one day change your mind. My Healers could learn a great deal from you. And I think you may grow to enjoy Polis, once again.”

Clarke’s stomach tightens for the briefest of moments. Years ago, it may have clenched, or flipped. Years ago, those words might have made her knees buckle, or her throat seize up, or her stomach feel as if it was falling out of her. As it is, it only manages a slight flutter before she’s back to feeling nothing.

_Polis will change the way you think about us._

Clarke glances over her shoulder and catches Ontari’s eyes on her, fixed to her back. She can recognize the expression on her face, finally.

Something like pity. Something like remorse. Something like grief, and loss.

Something like love.

(They don’t know each other. They haven’t spoken in nearly a decade, and the last time they had, it had been with Ontari’s knife pressed against Clarke’s throat, Ontari’s lips pulled back in a snarl over bared teeth, Ontari’s blood, hot and black, dripping onto her face.)

(They don’t know each other, but the way Ontari looks at her makes Clarke feel naked; exposed; vulnerable.)

(Seen.)

When Clarke speaks, she speaks not to the woman behind her, but to someone else: someone long gone, someone long dead, someone who will never hear her speak again but who maybe… who could possibly…

“May we met again,” she says quietly, so softly she’s not sure anyone else hears her. But when she turns and finally leaves the room, she sees that Ontari is frozen in place.

(“It’s part of Trikru mythology _,_ ” Octavia tells her later, much later, lying next to Clarke in the bed she usually shares with Raven. Raven has had to return to Arkadia to help Monty with some problem with the _Skaikru_ water filtration system, and Clarke has found that she doesn’t like to sleep alone. “Reincarnation and souls long gone. Ghosts that speak to you, past lives that communicate with the present, in order to guide them in the proper direction. The Commander is a body; a collection of many. As soon as she ascends she stops being a woman and becomes _Heda,_ the Spirit, the Flame. She isn’t just one person; she is every Commander who has ever come before her. An amalgamation of all of their desires and fears, hopes and dreams.”)

 

 

Clarke does not return to Polis for a very long time.

____________________

It starts off as a pain in her legs. An aching, swelling sort of distress around her ankles and her joints.

She stops riding, thinking that that’s the problem. She takes medicines, visits a few Healers, begins a few stretches and muscle exercises. But the aches continue.

Octavia teases her about getting old. Raven pulls Clarke’s legs onto her lap while they sit next to each other on the bed they share and she smiles a little at the roll-reversal, at the way their situations have switched. Raven’s fingers rub into the the muscles and tendons around her ankles, around her knees, and the pain subsides for a few moments, but it always returns.

It feels different than normal pain. Clarke has lived on the ground for a decade, and she’s intimately familiar with the aches of pulled and torn muscles, of the joint swelling from too long a ride. She knows how some insect bites can poison the blood and cause flare-ups and discomfort. But this doesn’t feel like that. It feels deeper. It’s not a muscle ache or the fatigue of age. It’s something different. Something in her bones and blood.

She wakes up one morning and she’s in so much pain she can’t walk.

That’s when Raven’s expression turns dark and worried, when Octavia leaps on her horse and rides at a break-neck pace for Arkadia.

Clarke stares up at the ceiling of their house as Raven’s fingers brush the hair away from her forehead and she thinks, for the briefest of moments, that she understands what Lexa must have felt in her last few moments alive.

Her eyes flutter closed. She’s not awake when her mother finally gets there.

____________________

“How long?”

“I don’t…”

“Mom,” Clarke says quietly, and Abby stares at her with eyes that are thick with unshed tears. Her mother looks so much older than she did when she first made it to the ground, but she’s still beautiful. As heartbroken as she looks, she’s still beautiful. “How long?”

Abby swallows thickly. “A few months. It’s hard to know how aggressive it is. But… probably a few months. Maybe winter.”

Clarke leans her head back against the cold wall of the Ark and lets that thought settle into her mind.

 _Until winter_ , she thinks. _Not very long. I won’t make it to the next anniversary._

“ _Clarke_ ,” her mother whispers, quietly devastated, and it’s then that Clarke realizes she’s started to smile.

Clarke laughs then, strangely. She laughs for a full ten seconds before she starts to sob. She sobs heavily, with anguished and tortured breaths, her shoulders shaking so hard she almost falls over.

Her mother wraps her up in her arms and cries, too.

 

 

“Can you do me a favor?” Clarke asks, hours later as they’re sitting side-by-side on Clarke’s old bed. After they’ve both dried their tears, and managed to pull themselves together.

Her mother’s hand is warm in hers. Her head is on Abby’s shoulder, allowing herself to feel comforted in a way she hasn’t since she was a little girl. “Anything you need,” her mother promises.

Clarke smiles at that, and it feels like a different sort of smile. Like the smile of a woman who has lived for a very long time and who has no regrets. Like the smile of a woman who has nothing left to lose. “Can you not tell anyone about this?”

Abby stiffens next to her. “Clarke…” she says softly.

“Please,” Clarke implores. “I’ll tell them. I’ll tell the ones who matter. But it… I’m not ready for them to know just yet.”

And Abby swallows thickly but she nods, and Clarke allows her mother to hold her for just a little while longer.

Tomorrow, she’ll return to Tondc. But tonight, she sinks into her mother’s arms and lets herself be rocked to sleep.

____________________

That summer, they lose Indra. She was old; had been growing older and more tired as the years went by. But she refused to give up, refused to slow down, refused to shirk her duties or responsibility to her Seconds. She works herself to the bone, fierce and unyielding as ever, up until the day she dies.

She goes quietly, in her sleep. Out in the trees and under the stars she loved so much, she finally leaves this world.

Octavia is the one who finds her. Clarke thinks that’s the way she would have wanted it.

The morning of Indra’s death Raven wakes her with a gentle hand on her cheek, and Clarke only has to blink her eyes blearily open before she knows.

She’s not sure how she does, but it’s like she knows immediately. Like something out in the woods had been whispering to her for years, and it’s only just now fallen silent. She doesn’t know how she knows — it’s an unexpected death, not one she was prepared for; not like her own — but there’s some feeling in the air this morning that hadn’t been there, before. Like the world is struggling to right itself.

She takes one look at Raven’s face and she knows, instantly, that Indra is gone.

 

 

They burn her body on the bed of a now-familiar river. The river Clarke had discovered years and years ago, on her own journey through the forest.

Octavia is the one to light the pyre, with her jaw tight and her eyes set. She doesn’t cry, but it’s not because she isn’t sad.

As Indra’s Second she takes over the army of Tondc. She sinks into the leadership role with an effortless sort of grace that makes Clarke believe that, more than anything and more than any of them, Octavia was born for the Earth.

Clarke starts to feel sicker, and weaker. Her bones start to hurt in her body, her joints begin to seize up. She gets out of breath walking from her bed to the front door. But she watches Octavia take command of her troops and feels something like _pride_ well in her chest, something like _strength_.

She knows she doesn’t have much time left, but Octavia has a whole future still to live out, and Clarke is glad that she made it long enough to see at least part of it realized.

____________________

As summer begins to draw to a close, Clarke returns to Polis. Just for a moment. Just to see.

She doesn’t have a lot of time left. Polis is only a two-days’ ride from Tondc but it takes her nearly double that, at the slow pace she’s forced to set.

Octavia rides with her (Raven is, of course, unable to make a journey of that length with her leg and her back being in the shape they’re in). She watches her friend carefully, out of the corner of her eye.

She knows something’s wrong. They both do. Clarke has told them that she’s sick, that she’s going to have to work hard to shake what she has, but she hasn’t told them the truth. She hasn’t told them how long she has left.

She doesn’t want to burden them. Not yet. Not when Raven is working so tirelessly on her civil engineering projects, designing greenhouses and irrigation systems so the _Trikru_ can grow crops year-round. Not when Octavia is training up her own batch of new warriors. (She just picked her Second, a young girl with hair like fire and a temperament to match.) Not when Bellamy has only just decided to put down his gun for good, choosing instead to study carpentry under the tutelage of one of Octavia’s neighbors.

She doesn’t want to burden them, just yet. Let them have a few more weeks, a few more months.

She doesn’t feel like she’s robbing them of time. Not really. Not when she has so little of it left to give.

She likes to think she’s giving them time, not taking it. She’s allowing them all to pretend, for at least a few more weeks, that everything might turn out alright. That the futures they’re building for themselves and each other may remain unchanged.

Let them have a few more weeks.

 

 

Ontari looks the same as she always has. Clarke has only seen her two other times in the decade or so since Lexa died. This is the third. But Ontari looks the same as she always has.

There’s something different about her eyes. Something deeper to them, something sadder. She has lived with a decade of responsibilities she was never meant to soldier, and though she looks the same as ever, it is clear that they have weighed heavily upon her.

She dismisses her guards from the room with a wave of her hand and Clarke gently urges Octavia out, too.

They stand alone, a few feet apart. Clarke is leaning heavily on a make-shift crutch she was able to fashion from the woods near where she lives.

“You’re hurt,” Ontari says by way of greeting. It’s not a question, but Clarke still shakes her head.

“Not hurt. Sick.”

She sees Ontari’s fingers twitch. “I see,” she says. “And… will you get better?”

“No.” Her answer is frank. Not cold, or biting. She doesn’t have the energy for cold. She only has the energy left to tell the truth.

There’s a sharp yet quiet inhale from the woman in front of her. Clarke sees something shift in her face. “I see,” she repeats. Her fingers twitch again, like maybe she wants to reach out, like maybe she wants to touch Clarke, but she doesn’t. They’ve only touched once in the entire time they’ve known each other, and it was years ago, when they were both impossibly younger, when they were both trying to kill each other. “Did you come to say goodbye?” she asks, and Clarke can’t quite tell if her voice is disdainful or hopeful. Maybe a mixture of both.

But she’s not here to say goodbye. She’s not here to make amends. She has a purpose, a drive, where she has been missing one for so long. It feels good. The motivation makes her head clear. “I came to ask you for something.”

“Anything.”

“One of your Healers, your scholars. Could you send them back to Tondc with me? I never… I won’t be able to take you up on your offer, but I thought… I have a little time. I want to share what I know. Write it down. So someone else at least has the information, after… after I go.”

So strange, that she says it like that. ‘ _After I go_.’ Like it’s some sort of trip she might one day return from. Not like it’s her own death she’s staring in the face.

“You may have my best Healer. Her name is Roma. I’ll send for her first thing in the morning. She’ll be with you whenever you’re ready to return to your home.”

“Thank you,” Clarke says, and she means it.

Ontari inclines her head. “If there’s anything else I can do to make your remaining time easier… please, let me know.”

“I will. _Mochof, Heda_.”

“Of course.” Ontari pauses, her expression curious. “I have heard…” She trails off. “Your partner,” she says, seeming to correct herself, “ _Reivon kom Skaikru…_ ” Her jaw twitches and she brings her hands behind her back, clasping them together. “Whatever she needs, she may have. For the rest of my time as Commander. Will you let her know?”

Clarke has to swallow around a lump in her throat. “I’ll tell her.”

“I’m glad you had someone,” Ontari says, but she doesn’t sound like Ontari when she’s saying it. Clarke wonders if maybe her mouth is being used to speak words that are not hers.

The thought makes her knees shake, just a little. Even after all these years.

She turns and leaves without a second glance behind her.

____________________

One day, Raven says to her, “I have something I need to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t want you to hate me. But I think you will.”

Clarke shakes her head. Even that little movement is getting hard for her to do, now. “Why would I hate you?” she asks because she doesn’t understand.

Raven holds out her hand, palm up and fingers open. Clarke looks down at the object nested there and loses all ability to breathe.

“Wh—”

“I kept one,” Raven says, something tight in her face, something that looks a lot like grief and guilt and pity and anguish. “I… I know we were supposed to turn them all in, but I… I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking… if things ever got bad and I needed… and I needed _something_ , that I—”

“But it…” Clarke looks down at the chip, unblinking, “you destroyed it. _We_ destroyed it. There’s nothing… there’s nothing there. Nothing left.”

Raven shakes her head, and Clarke can see that she’s started to cry. “Not all of it. Just… just the ALIE part. There’s not… there won’t be a lot left. But there might be… something. Someone.”

Clarke shakes her head adamantly. “No,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “It’s gone. She’s gone. We destroyed—”

“She still talks to Ontari,” Raven says, and Clarke’s heart crushes in on itself. She never should have told Raven about that day in Polis, never should have told her—

“That’s different.”

“Maybe. But it might mean… It might mean she survived. That some of them survived.”

Clarke feels sick. “I can’t,” she says like she’s broken. “I can’t… Raven, I can’t let myself think—”

“You’re dying, Clarke,” Raven says quietly, and Clarke finally looks up at her.

She can’t pick out the expression on Raven’s face. It’s hard to understand, hard to decipher, but it looks… she doesn’t look scared, not really. She looks… haunted. Mournful. She looks like a woman in love, who doesn’t know what to do.

The thought startles her. She never would have guessed that Raven could fall in love with her.

“You know,” Clarke says back, and Raven nods. Her eyes are wide, but she isn’t crying anymore. The chip sits in her hand, trembling a little as Raven’s fingers shake.

“Your mom told me.”

Clarke nods and tips her head back. Her eyes feel like they’re burning, and the welling feeling of _tears_ and _panic_ and _inevitable_ is starting to build in her throat like bile.

Her mom.

“I’m dying,” she says, still looking up at the ceiling of the house they share with Octavia.

She can see Raven nodding out of the corner of her eye. “So what do you have to lose?”

“I can’t,” she repeats. “It’s not… it’s selfish. And it probably won’t work.”

“You’re dying, Clarke,” Raven says, and her face is set and her eyes are stony but her voice quivers around the words. Clarke wants to hug her, but finds that she can’t. “It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work. And you’re dying. You’re allowed to be selfish.”

She holds her hand out again and Clarke carefully and ever-so-slowly takes the chip from her outstretched palm. She holds it between two fingers and holds her breath, like if she squeezes too hard she’ll shatter it.

“What if this brings back ALIE?” She asks quietly, like she cares about the answer.

Raven’s laugh is wet. “Then I’ll have ended the world trying to reunite you with your ex-girlfriend.” Clarke glances up at her, and Raven shrugs. “But I always knew the two of you were more important than all of this.”

Clarke swallows. “We should destroy it.”

Raven nods. “We should. I’ve thought about it for years. Almost did a few times, too.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t. Even when things got better, I never… I couldn’t.” She smiles weakly. “Guess I was never as strong as you, Princess.”

“I’m not strong,” Clarke says, looking down at the small blue chip in her hand.

“That’s where you’re wrong, Clarke. You were always the strongest one of us all.”

____________________

When it gets harder for her to wake up in the morning, when her body starts to actively rebel against her, when she starts spending most of her days in bed, that’s when the visits start.

Niylah appears first. Clarke wakes one morning alone in bed, and she’s confused momentarily until she sees her sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back leaning against the frame of Raven’s bed, her hair the same shade of dirty-blonde it always was. (Clarke’s not even sure why they still have that bed. They never use it. They could have gotten rid of it years ago, and made themselves something bigger to share, but they never got around to it.)

(Clarke wonders what Raven will do with her bed, once she’s gone. She can’t imagine she would want to keep sleeping in it.)

(She wonders if she’ll stay in this house, in this village, or if she won’t be able to stomach it. She wonders if she’ll leave. Octavia will probably stay. She built this house with her bare hands. But she’s not sure if Octavia will be enough to keep Raven here, too.)

She opens her eyes and sees Niylah sitting on the floor and she struggles to sit up, a small smile on her lips. “Hey,” she says softly, her voice caked with sleep. She still sounds exhausted, she still _feels_ exhausted, even though all she’s been able to do the past few days is sleep.

“Hello, Clarke,” Niylah says with her own smile, standing slowly from the ground. She bends and presses a soft kiss to Clarke’s forehead, and Clarke brings her hand up to her face lightly, holding her there for a few moments.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” Clarke whispers into the morning air. It’s been a few years. She’s glad to see that Niylah is still alive, is still healthy. She has a new scar on her upper lip, but otherwise she looks very much as she did the last time they met. Older, but still just as kind; still just as beautiful.

“I wasn’t sure if you would appreciate my visits. You had someone else. I wasn’t sure if she would be pleased to have me stop by.” There’s a twinge of sadness in her voice, a hint of _something once lost,_ and Clarke feels a wave of something float through her. Not quite guilt, not quite remorse, not quite grief. The recognition of some future she might have lived but never got the chance to see.

Clarke shakes her head. “Raven isn’t like that,” she says softly, and Niylah nods.

“I know that now,” she says. “She says she is returning to your people for a few days. To give us some privacy.” Clarke must look surprised, because Niylah smiles. “I told her it wasn’t necessary, but she insisted.” Her fingers brush against Clarke’s forehead and Clarke closes her eyes at the touch. “You’re losing weight, Clarke,” she says in a voice that’s barely there.

Clarke nods. “It’s getting harder to eat.”

Niylah looks at her with an expression of open and unfiltered grief. But she doesn’t cry. Clarke appreciates that about her. “So not long, then.”

“Not long now.”

“Then I’m glad I came to see you when I did.” She presses another kiss to Clarke’s forehead. Then to her nose. Then a brief brush against her lips. Clarke returns the gesture easily. “I will miss you when you’re gone,” she whispers against Clarke’s lips, and Clarke has to nod.

She’s not sure if there’s any such thing as an after life, if there’s such a thing as _something beyond,_ but she thinks that, if there is, she will miss being gone, too.

 

 

Bellamy comes next. He kneels by her bed and holds her hand loosely in his and he kisses her cheek and tries to crack jokes. He’s older now, too, a fully-grown man. His hands are big and strong, scarred and full of splinters. His hair is cropped short to his head and he looks down at her with eyes that look like they have experienced almost as much pain and heartbreak as she has.

“Don’t go, Clarke,” he asks her quietly when the sun starts to set. Practically begs. His voice wavers around the words and Clarke wants to promise him that she’ll stay, but she can’t.

So instead she makes him promise. “Look after Raven for me, yeah?” She asks, and Bellamy looks up at her with eyes that are wide and guilty, and he knows that she knows. He knows that she knows how he feels, how he’s been in love with Raven for years but has been too scared, too good, too honest to do anything about it. He loves Clarke, he loves all of them, and he would never do something to get in the way of that.

She thinks she never really deserved him.

“Look after Raven for me,” she says again, and Bellamy nods even as he cries. He gives a dying woman her last, final wish. She smiles and thanks him, and Bellamy kisses her cheek once again.

 

 

After Bellamy there’s Monty. And then Nyko. Kane. Even Murphy comes by, just long enough to press a kiss to her feverish forehead and tell her to stay strong before he disappears like a ghost on the wind again. If Raven weren’t sitting right next to her the whole time, she might have thought she’d dreamt it.

More people come by. Past patients, people she’s helped, children she’s started to teach. Roma has decided to stay in Tondc, at least until the end. To help with Clarke’s pain management. (It’s not treatment. There is no treatment, not for this. There’s nothing to cure. All they can do is wait and try to make it hurt less.) Clarke is glad to have her. She’s become something like a friend and confidant in the few months they’ve known each other, and she’s glad to have her around.

But eventually, it gets too hard to have visitors.

____________________

The leaves have started to fall off the trees. Clarke wakes up slowly each morning, her body a mess of aching joints. Her blood burns like poison inside of her.

More than once she struggles awake, forcing her eyes open with a slow kind of agony, only for her vision to be obscured by a curtain of Raven’s hair falling down onto her face. She wakes many mornings with Raven’s ear pressed against her mouth, like she had fallen asleep listening to Clarke’s labored breathing. To make sure she was still doing it, undoubtedly.

One morning, she doesn’t wake up at all. She sleeps for nearly twenty full hours before she can finally trudge out of the swamp that is her mind and push herself slowly, laboriously, up off of the bed.

She opens her eyes and Raven is sitting at the end of their bed, her back leaning against the wall. She has a slow and steady stream of silent tears slipping down her cheeks, and it’s an image so startling that Clarke immediately sits up further. “Raven?” She asks carefully, and Raven turns to her. Her lips twitch, like she’s trying to smile, but she can’t quite manage it.

“Octavia went to get your mom,” she says by way of hello.

Clarke nods in understanding. “I didn’t wake up this morning?”

“No. Second time this week.”

“Right.” Clarke uses her hand to gesture for Raven to come closer, and she does, crawling across the bed with her one good leg and one bad leg, her eyes bright with something Clarke can’t quite pick out. She draws Raven to her easily. Their kiss is practiced, is familiar. It’s comfortable. It feels like coming home.

When they pull away, Clarke leans her forehead against Raven’s and says, in a quiet voice, “Won’t be long now.”

“Yeah, Princess. Not long now.”

____________________

“Have we waited long enough?”

Clarke tries to nod, but she can’t quite make her neck move. She settles for closing her eyes and closing her lips.

Every breath is agony in her chest. Every movement hurts.

Raven looks down at her with something like determination. “Okay, Clarke,” she says softly, and Clarke tips her head a little toward the sound. “Okay.”

“Tell Lexa she should be grateful for what she has,” Raven says into the night air, but Clarke can’t see her. She thinks her eyes might be closed, but it’s hard to tell. “Some of us would kill for forever with you.”

Clarke laughs, even though the feeling of doing so makes her chest erupt in fire. “Always the romantic.”

There’s something smooth being pressed against her lips. Clarke opens her mouth slowly to accept it, and it sits on her tongue, tasteless and hard, before there’s water brushing past her lips and she can finally, finally swallow.

Raven presses the chip to Clarke’s lips and helps her swallow it. They don’t know if it’ll work, don’t know what the effects will be. It’s completely untested. The City of Light has been destroyed, untouched and unreachable for more than ten years, now. They have no idea what on Earth is waiting for her.

But Clarke doesn’t have to wait long.

“The pain’s gone,” she says quietly, and Raven’s answering laugh is wet and thick and doesn’t sound so much like a laugh as more of a half-choked-off sob.

“I’m glad, Clarke. I’m glad.”

She still can’t breathe, she still can’t move, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. It doesn’t hurt. She looks up at Raven and smiles through her own tears.

“It was good, yeah?” Raven asks her, pressing a kiss to the back of her hand, to the bridge of her nose, to her fluttering eyelids. “We were good?”

Clarke smiles and tries to nod, but she doesn’t think she quite manages. “The best.”

Raven bends and presses a kiss to her lips, and it’s the last thing Clarke feels.

By the time Raven withdraws from her, she’s already gone.

____________________

 

 

Clarke opens her eyes to a world full of blinding light.

She sits up groggily, feeling unsteady and more than a little nauseous.

“I was hoping it would take you longer to get here.”

She looks up, and her breath catches in her chest. “How did you know I would get here at all?” She asks, her eyes wide and unblinking.

Lexa smiles, open and free and unburdened by the weight of hundreds of deaths and thousands of lives. “I trusted you, Clarke. I’ve always trusted you.”

Clarke reaches out with shaky hands. She’s standing now, though she doesn’t remember getting up. Her fingers brush against the warm skin of Lexa’s smile, the sharp line of her jaw, the shape around her eyes. She shakes her head, her throat tight. “Are you real?” She asks. She can’t look anywhere but the green of Lexa’s eyes. “Is this real?”

Lexa smiles at her, her face as young as it was the day she died, her eyes clear and bright in a way Clarke has never seen them before. “Does it matter?”

And maybe the Clarke from ten years ago would have said, _Yes, it matters. It’s the only thing that matters. I’ve lived without you for almost half of my life and I can’t bear the thought of existing without you for any longer. So tell me that this is real and that you’re real and that what we have here can be real._

Instead she smiles back and says, “No. not really.”

 

                                                                                                                                      

____________________

**Author's Note:**

> I cried like 32 times writing this I was in a very melancholy mood and I was listening to the saddest playlist I’ve ever made just on repeat and… yeah. This is what came out of it.
> 
> Feel free to follow me on [ tumblr ](https://morningsound15.tumblr.com/)


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